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Everything You Need To Know About Carpenter Ants

Posted:Aug 25th, 2016

At Adam's Pest Control, we employ some very educated people who could very easily talk your ear off about carpenter ants. But let's be honest; you don't really need to know how many species of carpenter ant there are in the world or that they are in the genus camponotus and subfamily formicinae. What you need to know most is how to keep these ants from damaging your home. So we've put together this quick list of important facts to help you.

What You Need To Know About Carpenter Ants:

Carpenter ants don't eat wood, but they can do a lot of damage to wood by chewing tunnels and galleries in it. For this reason, you can sometimes tell if you have carpenter ants by the sawdust (frass) they kick out of their tunnels. This frass will often be found in basement areas, stuck to walls, and piled up near walls and on any wooden lip that will catch it.

A carpenter ant colony can have as many as 3,000 workers, but this takes several years. In those years, you may have little or no warning signs of their presence in your home. This is because carpenter ants don't have to eat anything in your pantry or kitchen to survive. They can live quite nicely off food sources that exist outside your home. A worker ant can travel 1,000 feet or more from their colony to find food.

If you see a single ant crawling around your home, it may be your only sign of a carpenter ant infestation. It is important to know what carpenter ants look like. These are the largest ants you'll find crawling around your home, and they will be black or blackish-red in color. Carpenter ants can also be distinguished by a single node between their thorax and abdomen.

When a carpenter ant colony matures, it will begin to produce winged male and female alates. These winged ants, also called swarmers or flying ants, will begin to appear on window panes inside your home. When this happens, you can know two things. First, you have a mature colony inside the walls of your home. Second, that colony is about to make more colonies.

If you find carpenter ants inside your home, here is another fact you should know... Adam's Pest Control services the greater Minneapolis area and a large portion of Minnesota with advanced, QualityPro - and GreenPro - certified pest control. You don't have to let carpenter ants eat away at your equity. Get pest control you can trust, from Adam's Pest Control.